


in the face of the sky

by Muir_Wolf



Category: Elementary (TV), Life (TV), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: ...sort of, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 02:52:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2212995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muir_Wolf/pseuds/Muir_Wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan and Sherlock, and Dani and Charlie, are the last four Mark-4 Jaeger pilots, in an AU, pre-movie Pacific Rim fusion.<br/> </p><p>  <i>Sherlock, Dani, Charlie, and herself, and she tries not to think of Pentecost upstairs running the numbers, arguing with the politicians, working with Gregson and Tidwell to try to keep this operation running.  The newest models are almost done—Mark-6’s that run like molten gold, by all accounts—but gold is exactly the problem.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	in the face of the sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galfridian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/gifts).



Sherlock leans against the table, his fingers tapping on the edge. If Joan were Dani, and Sherlock Charlie, she’d grab his hands to still them. Joan’s always had a larger pool of patience for her co-pilot than Dani has with hers, though. _Different strengths_ , Charlie would say, _make for a stronger team_. She can feel the corner of her lips tug up in a half-smile, and watches Sherlock notice it—not, she might add, without a degree of suspicion.

“What now?” he asks. His fingers, thankfully, have stilled for the moment.

“Charlie and Dani are running late,” she says.

“Oh. _Oh._ Do you think they’ve finally…” his hands move from the table to the air, creating awkward, vaguely obscene gestures, “…reconciled their differences?” he finishes, cocking an eyebrow.

At the far end of the room, their friends finally enter—Dani, in a flurry of motion, her head tilted back to let loose an exasperated sigh; Charlie appearing slower even as he keeps her pace, his movements tighter, more controlled, smirking.

“No,” she says, glancing out of the corner of her eye at Sherlock, “no, I don’t think they have.”

 

 

The four of them are the only Mark-4 pilots left—Emily and Nolan are still running their old Mark-3, _Red Revenge_ , but they’re on the other side of the ocean, protecting the Eastern Seaboard, and Joan doesn’t like to think of them too often. Doesn’t like to think about their luck running out, as it has for everyone else—doesn’t like to think of her own luck running out, either.

Not, as Sherlock would love to reiterate, that luck has anything to do with it. He doesn’t like to believe that anything is so completely out of his hands—an odd thing for a man as betrayed as he was to cling to, but Joan’s slowly learned him. He’s not a beach read of a book, but she’s had the time, and the inclination, and maybe that’s why they’ve matched so well. Maybe it’s just what she’s seen in the drift—Irene chasing the rabbit, pulling him down with her, and then—coming back to herself as the Kaiju attacked—cutting the neural bridge and leaving him to his fate. Maybe it’s what she saw after that—in the hospital, as he tried to get off the pain meds he’d started to depend a little too much on after the months of physical therapy he’d had to go through to get back to fighting fit.

She rolls her shoulder, stretches her neck to the left and the right. Sometimes after they drift the aches of his old injuries linger on her, a fading scent she can’t quite shake. Someday she’ll ask him if he feels them too, or if something of her bleeds onto him. Someday when she has the stomach to hear his answer.

Sherlock, Dani, Charlie, and herself, and she tries not to think of Pentecost upstairs running the numbers, arguing with the politicians, working with Gregson and Tidwell to try to keep this operation running. The newest models are almost done—Mark-6’s that run like molten gold, by all accounts—but gold is exactly the problem.

Sherlock’s liquidated more of the family fortune than she likes to think about, and Charlie has forced money at Gregson whenever Tidwell’s back was turned, trusting the more practical of the two to hide it from the more strangely sentimental. 

(Joan wasn’t living under a rock before the Kaiju appeared, after all—she knows where Charlie got his money. Hasn’t talked to him or Dani about it, hasn’t needed to, but secrets are hard to keep here, even when walls are made of reinforced steel.)

Mako’s working with Bell upstairs at the draftboards, and Joan decides to swing by before heading to the mess. Mako’s reworking an old Mark-3 that got destroyed a few years back. Whenever she gets caught up in a new project, she tends to forget the little things, like remembering to eat, and with Pentecost out of town at that summit meeting, chances are no one’s reminded her. She’d like to think that Bell might step up and be the responsible one, but she’s not one to make bets she knows she’ll lose, even against herself.

 

 

Mako’s eyes are bright as she looks up at Joan. They’ve known each other for almost a decade now—they met back when Joan transferred to the Shatterdome as a doctor, long before she exchanged her white coat for a Jaeger suit. She remembers Mako as a teenager, hanging out with her in the infirmary, restocking cabinets and generally as underfoot as someone can be. Not that Joan ever minded.

(Joan hasn’t forgotten that Mako was also the one to convince her to try the simulator, who half-bullied her into admitting the possibility that she and Sherlock were drift-compatible. Even then, Mako had an eye for that.)

“Have you two managed to tear yourselves away and eat something?” Joan asks, looking between Mako and Bell. Bell’s shoulder twitches up in a guilty half-shrug, and Joan sighs.

“Do you want to see the schematics?” Mako asks. Joan doesn’t bother checking her watch before she nods yes, watching Mako flip pages of meticulous notes and small, tidy handwriting. Mako’s been around the base long enough that most people tend to think of her as a younger sister, but Joan suspects that she’s one of the few that Mako considers an older sister in return.

 

 

The meeting earlier that day, which Dani and Charlie had run late for while _not_ “reconciling their differences,” was about funding. Pentecost prefers to keep things on a need-to-know basis, but Gregson seems to think his team needs to know, and while Pentecost’s at the summit meeting, Gregson had taken the opportunity to…enlighten them. Tidwell, unsurprisingly, had the same thoughts.

Mark-4 pilots only, had been the only meeting descriptor, and the four of them had shrugged about it yesterday when they got the heads-up, but whatever they were expecting, it certainly hadn’t been that.

Six months. Six months, that’s how long the funding was going to last, according to Gregson’s conservative accounts, Pentecost’s persuasive powers, and any and all favors that Tidwell had left to call in, which at this point wasn’t many.

For once, Charlie’s calm exterior had shattered—no surprise that a man that had spent as long as he had in prison would itch at the enclosing walls they were told would keep them safe. Sherlock had ranted, and paced, at the classic classism of it— _keep the rich safe, buried far from the shore, but what about those men and women that are building those Walls?_ —and Dani had radiated with a quiet, burning ferocity.

(Sometimes Joan is convinced that out of all of them, Dani is the one she understands best. How many nights have they stayed up until dawn, trading stories and drinking cold, too-strong coffee? How many times has she patched Dani up despite her best intentions, because Sherlock she could bully into going to the infirmary, and Charlie she could appeal to his reason if nothing else, but Dani would be coiled too tightly, her hand flexing as if to remind herself that she was alive, and she’d bleed herself out before letting anyone but Joan touch her? The boys may be needier in broader ways, but Dani is the one that crawls into Joan’s bed when she can’t sleep, her hands cold and shaking until she buries herself beneath Joan’s blankets, breath slowly evening out in the darkness. Sherlock sees it in the drift, and Charlie must see it as well, but these are the things they do not talk about.)

There aren’t a whole lot of options left on the table, although Gregson and Tidwell had both opened the floor for discussion, and she knows that both of them were half-holding out hope that they’d come through with a Hail Mary. They were all fairly brilliant in their own right before the Breach opened—Joan isn’t boasting, Joan is in fact entirely loathe to talk about her days as a doctor, and shuns that part of her life entirely except for those few moments when she is stitching Dani back together—but the Shatterdome pulled something out of them that they hadn’t even realized was there. It’s not out of nowhere that Gregson and Tidwell had pulled only the Mark-4 pilots into a meeting, had left their Mark-5 and soon-to-be Mark-6 pilots out in the blissful ignorance of the cold. The four of them have come through before, every time it’s been necessary.

 

 

Joan loops her arm through Mako’s as they head out to the mess after Mako walked her through their progress. Bell’s a few feet behind them; he’d run into Seever, from the control room, and they’re talking over Newt’s latest predictions.

“How long until she’s up and running, do you think?” Joan asks Mako. It’s a question she’s usually shied away from, not wanting to tie Mako down to a schedule that might change any moment, given their world. Right now, though, it’s hard to think of anything besides time—time, and the way it keeps slipping through their fingers.

“I am hoping she will be ready in another seven months,” Mako says.

Joan’s arm tightens around Mako’s for a moment, pinning it against her side as if trying to keep her close. It’s a reflex, and even as she does it she’s already working to relax it, but she can’t release her heart from her throat quite so easily. Seven months. Mako’s Jaeger will never be completed.

“Joan?” Mako asks, her voice lilting around her name, and Joan wants to press her palm to Mako’s cheek, wants to pull her into arms and keep her safe, wants wants wants. She does none of these things.

“She’s going to be beautiful, Mako,” she says instead. Pentecost hasn’t told Mako for a reason, and she won’t interfere. Sometimes secrets are all they have left.

 

 

Joan rolls the cup of cold coffee between her hands. What she’d really like right now is a beer, and later she and Charlie might sneak off to their little corner away from their world and drown their sorrows, but they both avoid drinking around Dani and Sherlock. She takes a long swallow of her coffee, rolling it over her tongue, and pretends it’s the burn of something stronger, and harder.

“Any bright ideas?” Dani asks. The four of them are in Charlie’s room. Charlie is sitting at the foot of his bed, and Dani is leaning against the pillows at the head. Joan is sitting at the table, her feet on her chair and her knees tucked up against her chest, and Sherlock, naturally, is pacing.

“Maybe we could steal from the UN,” Charlie offers. “Just, steal everything. Steal the UN itself?” Dani nudges his leg with her foot, her eyes losing their pinched look as she looks at him. “We could use the Jaegers,” he says. “They’d never stop us.”

“Blackmail would be a better prospect,” Sherlock says. His voice is tight, his back still that too-straight stance that means he’s been busy in the intervening hours burying himself in stress and misplaced guilt. Joan frees a hand from her coffee, and drags it down her face.

“Is that a serious suggestion? Do you have something in mind?” Dani asks, sitting up a little, one eyebrow inching up.

“Yes, and no,” he says. “My brother, though—” he breaks off the words abruptly, so abruptly that Joan thinks she can almost hear the teethmarks in them as he bites them back.

Joan knows about Mycroft, of course. They’ve drifted together, Joan knows all the threads of Sherlock’s life. He’s never tried to hide them from her, either, even in the very beginning when she tried to hold things tightly to her chest. Of course, he’d drifted before, with Irene. He must have known a losing battle when he saw one.

Charlie watches Sherlock silently for a moment, two. Dani turns her attention to Joan, lifting a shoulder in question, but Joan is watching Charlie watch Sherlock, waiting for his patience to tick away.

“What about your brother?” Charlie asks. Joan suspects—Joan has suspected, for a while now—that Charlie knows more about Sherlock than he’s let on. He’s still keeping his cards close to his vest, and Joan isn’t sure whether it’s to protect himself or Sherlock. She trusts Charlie completely, but she’s never understood him as well as she has the other two.

“He knows…he would be able to find out,” Sherlock says. “He would have blackmail on the people we would need to have blackmail on.”

“Wait, hold on,” Dani says, tucking her feet underneath her as she sits fully up, “who exactly is your brother? Is he some sort of spy?”

“No,” Joan says, finally cutting in. She turns to Sherlock. “The question, though, is whether or not he’ll help us.”

Sherlock is still. Too still, she’s sure, but she can’t say she blames him. Some things she knows from the drift, but others she knows because he’s handed them over to her on quiet afternoons, on late nights, his words singed from the fire in his chest.

“He’s never believed in the Wall,” Sherlock says. It’s not an answer at all, but she is certain, as soon as the words leave his lips, that it’s all the answer he is willing to give. Whatever bad blood may rest between them, whatever kind of reckless idiot Mycroft believes Sherlock to be for coming to the Shatterdome in the first place, Mycroft does not believe in the Wall. It’s not much of a hope, but they’ve turned battles around on less.

 

 

Sherlock doesn’t have a chance to call Mycroft before the alert sounds—a Kaiju crawling out of the Breach. Gregson and Tidwell order the four of them out—it’s a Level IV, and while the Mark-5 pilots have the better equipment, no two Jaegers work as well together as they do.

Joan’s chest feels too full, her heart swimming with a mixture of feelings she can’t quite get a handle on, but she feels herself uncoil, just a little, as she meets Sherlock at their Jaeger.

Drifting with Sherlock shouldn’t be as easy as it is. He’d said to her once, that he was better with her—sharper, more focused, and she’d wanted to ask him if he meant compared to Irene, or whether he meant he—

She didn’t ask him.

Sometimes, though, sometimes she thinks she’s better in the drift; there is a clean sort of control in drifting with him, as if she brings clarity to the rapid-patter of his brain, as if he leads their thoughts in a dance. She doesn’t quite miss it the rest of the time, but there is a part of her, just a part, that is always reaching for him.

 

 

Outside, in the water, Joan-and-Sherlock take the Kaiju from the left, and Dani-and-Charlie come from the right. Between their two Jaegers they have thirteen kills, and eight of those were together. Joan-and-Sherlock linger on that thought for just a moment—Dani and Charlie might be co-pilots, but some days it feels like the four of them pilot co-Jaegers—and then the Kaiju knocks into them, sending them back a step, and then two.

Joan starts the plasma cannon as Dani-and-Charlie pin the Kaiju for a moment, and she can feel Sherlock’s breathes in time with her own, can feel his lungs filling and emptying as he shifts to guide them into position.

“Get out of the way,” Sherlock demands, and Dani-and-Charlie oblige, sliding to the side as the Kaiju roars, and Joan’s hands are steady, Joan-and-Sherlock’s hands are steady, as they fire.

 

 

Dani has a bruise on her hip from when their Jaeger collided with the Kaiju. She’s sprawled on Joan’s bed, this time, her pants obligingly slid down on one side, and her eyes are soft but amused as Joan scolds her lightly. Behind her, Charlie and Sherlock are talking about Mycroft, but right now Joan is focused on Dani, on the way Dani’s hand is curled around Joan’s wrist.

“Sometimes I think you get yourself hurt on purpose,” Joan says, her voice aiming for and yet falling far, far short of severe. Dani smiles, her thumb rubbing against Joan’s pulse point.

“I’ll do what I have to to get some one on one time with my doctor,” Dani says, rolling her eyes with a grin. “It’s nothing, Joan.”

“I know,” Joan says, leaning back. “You just have a habit of getting a lot more nothings than anybody else.”

“It’s a gift,” Dani says. “How about you?” she adds, her fingers increasing their pressure slightly. “You took the last shot.”

“How did you know it was me, and not Sherlock?” Joan asks.

“I just know,” Dani says. “You don’t like taking the last shot. Hippocratic Oath, or some bullshit,” she adds, and Joan chokes on a sharp bark of laughter.

“I think I’m a bit past that, Dani,” she says. Behind them, the boys have quieted, and Joan turns to face them, leaning into Dani’s knees as she does so. “So, figured out how to save the world yet?”

Charlie and Sherlock exchange looks, and then Sherlock rocks onto the balls of his feet, nods.

“I’ll make the call,” he says.

 

 

Alfredo, one of Sherlock’s old friends, brings them the flash drive.

“Are we really doing this?” Dani asks. Her hands are buried in her pockets, her shoulders tense. Joan understands the feeling.

“There are a limited amount of opportunities in a lifetime,” Charlie says. “We have to decide whether we prefer to grasp the ones within reach, or whether we’d rather let them pass us by, waiting on the perfect thing that we might never get close enough to grab.”

“Either we jump, or everybody else falls, right?” Joan asks. She hasn’t done a whole lot of jumping in her life, but Mako is the one that convinced her to jump towards Sherlock. She owes her for that. She owes her for a whole hell of a lot more, and even if she didn’t, she loves that kid. She loves this planet. She’s fought for this planet, and fought for these people, and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t go down fighting. Dirty fighting, maybe, but the point stands.

“We could take it to Pentecost,” Sherlock says, but he sounds as against the idea as Joan is.

“That puts him in quite the bind,” Dani says with a grimace. “I don’t think we’re _technically_ committing treason, but—”

“We either do this, or we don’t,” Joan says. “Nobody else needs to get involved.”

“‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,’” Charlie says, and Joan’s lips twitch up slightly at the Benjamin Franklin quote.

Dani knocks her shoulder into Charlie’s. “What the hell, right?” she says.

“What the hell, indeed,” Sherlock says, trying for flippant. He doesn’t quite succeed, though, and the rest of them look at him, smirking. “No,” he’s already saying, “no, I’ll never say that again,” but Dani’s already turned her head into Charlie’s arm, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter. “You’re all bastards,” he says dryly, and it’s enough to set them all off entirely.

 

 

“They’ve approved funding for a full fourteen months,” Gregson says. “Eight months longer than they’d told us less than a week ago. Eight months longer than their _final, written in stone, there is no chance they’ll change their mind_ decision.”

“That’s excellent news!” Sherlock says, letting his words pop a little too obviously in his mouth.

“Funny how the winds of change can blow in and set things right,” Charlie says.

“You wouldn’t have had anything to do with this, would you?” Tidwell asks, his demeanor temporarily taking the form of a high school principal. Joan leans into Dani’s side, and the two of them mirror identically innocent expressions.

“How could we?” Dani says.

“I think we’re all just glad the program is going to have the chance to keep keeping people safe,” Joan adds demurely.

Gregson and Tidwell exchange tired, arguably proud expressions.

“Get out of here,” Gregson orders after a beat, and the four of them drag themselves out of their seats and towards the mess.

“Fourteen months isn’t that much longer,” Dani says once they’re out of earshot, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.

Joan thinks of the Kaiju that they killed mere days ago, thinks of Mako’s Jaeger and the heat of Sherlock’s body so close to her own.

“It’s long enough,” she says. “It’ll have to be long enough.”

 

 

That night, as Joan brushes her hair out, she thinks of the Shatterdome, thinks of the drift, thinks of the people she’s trusting the last dredges of her luck to, because no one becomes a Jaeger pilot without knowing that someday their luck will run out.

Nobody wins forever.

She brushes her hair out, and washes her face, and climbs into bed, and when Dani comes in in the middle of the night, hands cold, Joan lifts the edges of her blanket and pulls her in.

Nobody wins forever, but she’ll take the victories she can, and steal the moments that flit by. She’ll drift with Sherlock and listen to Mako and drink with Charlie and lie here, in the dark, with Dani, and she’ll take the opportunities that find her, and cheat for the ones that don’t.

Nobody wins forever, but Joan will hold all their secrets close, hold all their secrets tight, and count herself lucky for the wins they get.


End file.
